


Time

by sass_bot



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: Body Horror, Drabble, F/M, Heavy Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 14:56:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20229730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sass_bot/pseuds/sass_bot
Summary: The Architect muses over the inevitablity of time---he's never needed to until he met her.[Originally posted on tumblr 17.11.2018]





	Time

Time. It’s been far too long since he’s cared about time. Far too long since he’s had to care about time.

The stone ceiling makes it difficult to keep track of its passage—every single day melts into the next and the next until he realizes how pointless it is to even try to count. He hasn’t seen the sun in decades. No; that’s only a half-truth. That depends entirely on how one would define the concept of the sun.

The sun is an orb of white flame that watches Thedas from a distance; it sits in the sky, held up far beyond the reach of any god or mortal by its own sovereignty—the ruler of the day, as it were. And then is sets, leaving its fretful daughters to watch over its kingdom. But night and day—they have no place here; all he has is the cerulean glow of the lyrium veins and fire, bright and reliable. And, therefore, the sun, as a concept, means very little to him.

Never had he needed a word for such a concept until she came along—fervent as a flame and twice as radiant. She broke the ceiling open and created a sky all her own out of the dirt and the rubble; she declared herself the queen and stood, with the finesse and gait of a dancer, just beyond his reach. And as soon as she appeared, she disappeared, leaving behind a night like death, and a chill that reminded his ancient skin how to feel cold again.

And then he remembers time—time again. Oh, to be able to count the days that have passed of this night, if only to find out how many days remain until the dawn.

The dawn does come, however, and he ponders the irony of someone so luminous that she could cast light on every shadow of the deep roads being named after the night.

This day is not as bright as yesterday. Is it him, perhaps? Has his darkness tainted her? The last time he dared to reach for what he could not possess, he brought ruin to the world, and here he stands at the precipice once more, staring down into the gentle abyss, watching it rise and fall like the ocean. To think he closed his ears off to the ages for a woman.

The stillness holds a deadly hand to his throat, scraping and picking at his skin, poking small holes in his windpipe, and forcing its curious child-like fingers into the wound; it tugs and tears, making it bigger until he can’t take it anymore—until he’s dragged to his feet as if by the invisible strings of a malevolent puppetmaster.

He doesn’t know how many times he has done this—how many days it has been. Every time he looks upon her, in fitful rest, arms wrestling with her furs, he wonders what monsters are hiding on the backs of her eyelids, that they have the privilege of visiting her in the Fade and would waste it by drawing screams from her lips when they could be drawing melodic laughter.

The Grey Warden Calling is not a phenomenon he has encountered with such harrowing intimacy before, and as such, he could not begin to predict the end of this rope. Would it bring her illness and pain, or would it eat away at her mind and soul instead until she is nothing but the husk of a dead star, laying charred and discarded at his feet?

His hand finds its way into the inky black coils of her hair; it’s bolder than he’s ever been, and for the first time in centuries, his body remembers what softness and heat feel like. He feels the quickening of his heart almost as though he were actually alive—exhilaration, desire, and melancholy all at once.

And then he removes his hand, and with it, a lock of that exquisite hair that she loves so much. It comes out far too easily, as though her frail tainted body had considered it far too heavy a burden and simply forsaken it. He closes his fingers around it and manages to tilt the corners of his lips in a mournful frown.

Again, he yearns for a way to count down the hours. He begs whichever god will listen to a rotting corpse for a way to freeze the sands in the hourglass exactly where they are—to tip it over on its side if they must—if only to give him more time.


End file.
